Blog
By Cory Minton |
Grab your hoodies, your witty black t-shirts, and maybe your capes…it’s time for another exciting Splunk .conf, the annual Splunk User Conference taking place this week at the Walt Disney Swan and Dolphin Resort.All of us at EMC are excited to be sponsoring .conf for the third year in a row, and this year our presence will be bigger and better than ever before.Dell is hosting two technical sessions this year, we’ll have more than 20 of the Dell Splunk Ninjas running around learning and a large booth in the partner pavilion demonstrating our technology solutions.. For all the details, check out our .conf16 site.
This year marks the beginning of a great relationship between two awesome tech businesses: Dell and Splunk. We joined forces through a formal strategic alliance that started in February.This alliance enables Dell and its partners to sell Splunk’s industry leading platform.And, it allows Dell unique access to Splunk technical resources for solution design, testing, and validation. Most importantly, it creates a framework for these two technology powerhouses to collaborate more effectively for customer success.
Why Dell for Splunk?
When we talk about customer success, we mean it in two distinct ways: deploying Splunk on Dell platforms and, using Splunk to derive value from Dell infrastructure.
First, we believe success is deploying Splunk on a flexible infrastructure that not only helps Splunk run fast and efficiently, but also one that can scale easily as the usage of Splunk evolves in a customer organization. We believe that converged and hyper-converged technologies powered by Dell’s robust portfolio of storage technologies delivers on this vision and provide additional enterprise capabilities:
- Cost effective & Optimized Storage – Dell delivers optimized and efficient storage by aligning the right storage to Splunk’s hot, warm, and cold data long retention and varying performance requirements.
- Flexible & Scale-Out capacity consumption model – Scale-out infrastructure to meet capacity and compute requirements independently or as a single, converged platform as per your data growth.
- Data Reduction & other data Powerful Enterprise Capabilities – including secure encryption, compression & deduplication of indexes, and fast, efficient zero-overhead copies for protection.
Bottom-less cold bucket – Scale-Out storage platforms, whether on premise or in the cloud, obviates the need for a frozen bucket by providing a PB-scale cold bucket solution, simplifying data management and making data always searchable.
Splunk and Dell engineering teams have engaged in a strategic collaboration to ensure that all Dell platforms have been validated by Splunk to “meet or exceed Splunk’s published reference server hardware” guidelines. The Splunk team takes this validation process very seriously and customers can rest assured that if they are considering infrastructure for your Splunk deployment, we have done extensive testing. Whether you are looking at hyper-converged solutions like VXRail or VxRack, converged solutions like VBlock systems, or just storage from EMC like ScaleIO, XtremIO, VNX, Unity, Isilon, or Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), you can be confident that the work has been done by both Splunk and Dell to make sure it runs well.
Secondly, we believe Splunk is an incredibly powerful platform for capturing and deriving value from machine data. As it turns out, Dell products spin off a massive amount of “digital exhaust” that can be captured easily and used to drive operational intelligence in IT. Dell has made massive investments over the last few years to build apps for our platforms and make them available in Splunkbase for free. We’ve built apps for XtremIO, Isilon and VNX and expect to have many more in the works. These apps make it simple to ingest data from Dell platforms, and we offer useful, pre-built reports and dashboards to make monitoring these assets simple. And it doesn’t stop there…once the data is extracted from your Dell platforms, the underlying searches powering our reports or just the indexes themselves can be used in investigations across the entire IT service stack. One of my favorite things to hear from our customers is the exciting ways they use the apps beyond just simple reporting and I hope to hear many more stories this year at .conf2016.
Dell Splunk Ninjas And Our Top Ten List
The Dell Splunk Ninja team are at the show in their Dell blue Ninja Hunt shirts. The Dell Splunk Ninja team is a group of more than 40 systems engineers from across Dell who have been trained the same way Splunk trains its own systems engineers. The Ninjas hold certifications ranging from SE1 all the way to SE3, we’ve got skills across not only using Splunk, but administering and architecting it at scale. This is a global team not only available to talk to you at .conf, but also available in the field to have direct conversations with you when you head back to the office.
Our wise, passionate and zany Ninja team recently pulled together a list of Top Ten Best Practices for Splunk on Dell. This list has been amassed based on years of lab testing and real world customer experience. You may say ‘Duh’ to some, but others may surprise you.
Happy Splunking!
